Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999), Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. The information age has not dissolved old antagonisms between capital and labour but enhanced them. Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that computers, telecommunications and genetic engineering are 'shaped and deployed as instruments of an unprecedented, worldwide order of general commodification' whilst paradoxically also hold the potential for a (communist) sharing of wealth (1999: 2). He is no apologist for 'actually existing socialism' (that has all but disappeared), but wishes to focus critical attention on the current 'informational commissars' (1999: 7; that are difficult to discern almost as if Stalin has erased them from view). To many neo-liberal commentators, if totalitarianism was the inevitable outcome of Marxism, then the networked computer represented actually existing freedom - as if. Dyer-Witheford's approach considers the attacks on Marxism of neo-liberal and post-Marxist critique that claims Marxism is reductive and economically determinist (such as the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe). To Dyer-Witheford, some of these critiques point to there is simply too much unfinished business (1999: 9) - on the contrary, it is capitalism that is reductive and economically determinist. The two figures of Marx and Babbage are often opposed to indicate the tension (or class war) between the revolutionary and someone engaged in the scientific organisation of industrial capitalism to automate labour. Marx's chapter 'Machinery and Large Scale Industry' in Capital is somewhat of a response to Babbage's writings and the struggle of human and machine labour, as well as the expansion of the world market. In the mid nineteenth century as now, scientific advances were adopted by capitalists at the expense of all else. Drawing upon the Grundrisse, Dyer-Witheford explains this in terms of the contestation over 'general intellect': 'capital's drive to dominate living labour through machinery will mean that "the creation of real wealth comes to depend less and less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed" than on "the general state of science and on the progress of technology." The key factor in production will become the social knowledge necessary for technoscientific innovation - "general intellect." (1999: 4; quoting the Grundrisse, pp. 705-6) In contrast, Daniel Bell's update of his 'postindustrial' thesis (as a further developmental wave of his preindustrial, industrial and postindustrial societies) characterises the 'information revolution' in the following terms, as: 'a set of reciprocal relations between the expansion of science, the hitching of science to a new technology, and the growing demands of news, entertainments and instrumental knowledge, all in the context of rapidly increasing population, more literate and educated, living in a vastly enlarged world that is now tied together, almost in real time....' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 21; this emphasis on information is in keeping with Mark Poster's 'mode of information', 1990, that supersedes the mode of production) Industrial production is superseded by information, and capital is regenerated in a new form suitable to the general state of science and progress of technology. Bell proposes that knowledge will replace labour and capital as the main factor of production (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 19; along with issues of subjectivity and language of post-structuralism). This new crucial material resource is technoscientific knowledge tied to informational technologies. According to this rhetoric, any reference to the exploitation of labour, alienation, and the concentration of wealth are seen to be only outmoded references to the industrial period. Indeed the information revolution will engender the classless society, nonalienated work and the dissolution of property that was once promised by Marxism itself. The irony is that Marxist logic is used against itself in such models. Dyer-Witheford puts this as: 'In a classic dialectical trope, historical materialism has been dematerialized' (1999: 28). History has simply refused to end - making Fukuyama's 'end of history' misguided. This is clearly not to say that Marxism requires some rethinking. It is bound to an industrial period that has long passed and some of its central tenets are outmoded. For instance, it presupposes the central importance of the material base over the superstructure in such a way that information and knowledge are seen as secondary. Put another way, in the information age, it places too much importance on hardware as opposed to software. The proletariat as the privileged agents of change also requires some attention under the present condition of production (see elsewhere). Workerless factory: Against accusations that Marx is technologically-determinist, there is a complex interaction of social and technological forces at work defining what would now be termed a 'socio-technical system' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 40). The machine to Marx represents the potential for further enslavement and liberation from certain tasks and the opening up of new variations. The extreme situation is the image of the automated, worker-less factory, what Ernest Mandel calls the 'absolute inner limit of the capitalist mode of production' where surplus value can no longer be created because living labour has been eliminated. Indeed, Mandel observes that: 'Capitalism is incompatable with fully automated production in the whole of industry...' (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 45; quoting Mandel's Late Capitalism). He also rejects the idea that labour would shift to research activities as this would undermine the essential division between manual and intellectual labour. All this means, to the hopeful Mandel, that the fate of capitalism is inevitable under current technological conditions. This is not simply a case if capitalism automating itself to destruction (evoking machines turning on human society) but that the inner conflict between expansion and profit will create the conditions of antagonism required for its destruction. Sharing a determinist trajectory with Daniel Bell, Mandel's scenario is the counter-thesis to the enthusiastic celebration of the information revolution - in this case, information is tied to the logic of capital and evokes revolution. The worker-less factory is also discussed in more detail by David Noble in Progress without People (1995) in which he describes computerised labour processes. This is not simply a more efficient example of Taylorist scientific management but also an example of the need to exert complete control and to break the power of skilled unionised machinists (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 49-50). This can be read as an extension of what Adorno and Horkheimer predicted in their critique of scientific and technological rationality (1997; written 1947). To them, the forces of production have become the forces of domination, and moved beyond the factory to the culture industry at large (Fredric Jameson has more to add on this). Capitalism thus exerts a technological power made explicit in 'generalized or social Taylorism' that 'extends capitalist control of knowledge beyond the factory to society as a whole' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 51; citing the work of Frank Webster and Kevin Robins as 'radical pessimists'). The debates about the role of culture in terms of domination are complex and raise a whole strata of claims and counter-claims in cultural studies from the decentralising of the human subject to the accusation of cultural studies as 'designer socialism'. Along with all that is solid, Marxist commitment has melted too, according to Sivanandan. (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 59; A. Sivanandan's sense of commitment is compared with the 'culturalism' of Stuart Hall). The key factor here is that human agency has been variously described under the conditions of the information revolution - a subjectivity that has been constituted differently in the 'socio-technical system'. Autonomista: Despite its various forms, there is a consistency in Marxist thinking that agency, antagonism, and self-organisation are crucial factors. For Dyer-Witheford, these concerns coalesce in 'autonomist Marxism' suitable to a contemporary engagement with technology (1999: 64) - not post-Marxism but 'Marx beyond Marx' (Negri, 1991). Autonomist Marxism considers the informational apparatus of capitalism as a further stage of its regeneration. It proposes that new forms are instruments of domination but also that they present new opportunities for resistance leading to an alternative vision of communication and community (actually existing communism). In order to develop and sustain the information technology sector, a new labour force also had to be produced (including systems operators, programmers, computer scientists, technicians, software engineers, designers, computer-literate office workers, and so on). Correspondingly, new forms of antagonisms have arisen, most notoriously in the form of the hacker with the potential to perform knowing acts of sabotage. Also new forms of collective action can take place in virtual space as in the case of virtual sit-ins, simply using communications networks to mobilise support of particular causes or the forming of 'virtual communes' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 128). [I discuss these in more detail elsewhere] Autonomists emphasise labour, but not simply in terms of capitalist exploitation to produce surplus value, but labour as creative human energy - what Marx calls 'the living, form-giving flame' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 65). In this scenario, the worker is placed at the centre as the active subject of production providing skills, cooperation and the innovation required for capitalism - that attempts to command labour as its passive object. The proletariat is defined in terms of this struggle for autonomy - as the collective working class subject not simply as capital's object of labour power. Negri sees the proletariat as a 'dynamic subject, an antagonistic force tending toward its own independent identity' (in Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 66). Living labour is thus expressed as the desire for autonomy from capital. The constant revolutionising of the means of production is capital's way of regenerating itself and breaking the alliances and collectives that oppose it. It does not wish to destroy it of course, as it is fundamental to its operations, but subdue its oppositional stance - and does so by turning the whole of society into a site of production (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 67; citing the work of Mario Tronti). Essential to this concept, is the expansion of the idea of productive labour to include reproductive labour as well as unpaid forms (thereby adding students and homeworkers to the mix - as well as those involved in the production of free software of course). (Note: The redefinition of 'proletarian' is further explained by its original meaning describing someone who only has the ability to reproduce themselves according to Peter Linebaugh, extending the Marxist interpretation as someone with only their labour to sell (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 107).) The autonomists call this restructuring aspect the 'cycle of struggle' (from which Dyer-Witheford takes the subtitle for his book) and recognise that resistance needs to transform itself in parallel to this process of renewal. The restructuring of capital and the recomposition of the proletariat chase each others tails - in what Tronti calls a spiralling 'double helix' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 68). However unlike capital that needs labour, labour doesn't require capital; thus is potentially 'autonomous' and can use its creative energy differently. Given that technology is used as an instrument of control over labour, the struggle against it also requires an engagement with the technical apparatus. Clearly technological innovation is bound up with capital's restructuring and technologised managerial control. In general, the autonomists recommended that workers resist the controlling effects of technology by active refusal rather than passive acceptance. In Domination and Sabotage, Negri advocates a refusal to work; that 'workers should stop the innovations used against them - if necessary, by sabotage' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 70). The creative power to use technology differently, to reappropriate it, rests in the workers themselves as they are the ones who have the expertise to operate it, what Negri calls '"invention power" - the creative capacity on which capital depends for its incessant innovation' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 71; an explicit example is the activist Franco Berardi's involvement in the network of politicised pirate radio as part of the autonomist movement). The contemporary intersections of activism and creative use of computer technologies is a case in point. As an active part of the 'process of deconstructing and reconstructing technologies' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 72), creative labour can reappropriate the instruments that are part of its very domination in the cycle of struggle between labour and capital. Transformation is embedded in creative human action. Autonomist writings define closely the ways in which informatics have changed the nature of work. These innovations serve to limit the oppositional power of the collective worker, leaving them fragmented, dispersed, and under different conditions of work characterised by globalisation. Proletarian autonomy involved in direct production in the factory appears to be a thing of the past. The autonomists propose the category of the 'socialised worker' to describe the worker now extended through production and reproduction from the factory to society itself (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 80; attributing the term to Romano Alquati and later extensively developed by Negri). This is the 'factory without walls'. The production process now extends to all aspects of production and reproduction: exemplified by changes in higher education - once a site of learning transformed into training and/or corporate research facilities (Note: Universities have become more and more subject to the industrial requirements of capital acting as research and training facilities for hig-technology development. Accordingly the conditions are right for academics to work with other oppositional social groups more than ever before under the conditions of 'general intellect' - see later notes on this crucial concept.) Negri claims the working day has been transformed into the life-span into the full realisation of Marx's concept of 'real subsumption' (as the swallowing of society by capital) (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 81). All this, intensifies the class struggle for Negri, in a synthesis of old working class collective organisation and new social movements. Negri proposes that the control of communication (rather than the wage in Marx) is the emergent arena of antagonism (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 85; in this concentration on communication he is clearly influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist thinking). He claims that capital tries to capture the communicative capacity of the socialised labour force and turn it into information. Any critique of exploitation must recognise this in the 'information factory'. Opposition to capital for Negri, in the form of the anti-capitalist subject is 'rooted in the communicative interconnections of socialized production' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 87) - or to put it in the manner of the well-known hacker slogan 'information wants to be free' (wants to become communication again in Negri's terms to avoid the na•ve technological determinism). -- Globalisation: In global capitalism, development and underdevelopment are held in dialectical tension. In 1975, Mario Montano describes two opposing dynamics: 'on the one hand, the "underdevelopment of development" - with the "Latin Americanization" of the United States and Europe - and on the other a "development of underdevelopment" with the industrialization of portions of the former Third World.' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 133) All three former worlds are thus combined to exploit labour and maximise surplus value. (The world can only be described as an ideological mess when 'actually existing socialism' in the form of The People's Republic of China operates a political system of State Capitalism.) Alongside these restructuring processes is a new international division of labour in the service of globalised capital. This is a policy of (class) war - the enacting of real or symbolic violence on those without protection. Consequently, Dyer-Witheford explains, opposition takes the form of peace action in the coalition of forces (trade unionists, feminist, ecologists, indigenous peoples for instance) (1999: 157) - in the UK, represented in the anti-war protests, before, during and after Blair/Bush's second Gulf war (2003). The concept of 'netwar' emphasises the importance of communicative action whether for violent or peaceful ends. -- General Intellect: The concept of 'general intellect' has become immensely important in discussions around contemporary forms of class antagonism and discussions on the knowledge economy. The original source is a section in the Grundrisse (1981) called 'Fragment on Machines' in which Marx describes that at a certain point in capitalist development, real wealth will be measured not on labour time in production but on technological expertise and organisation. The crucial element will be the 'general powers of the human head', 'general social knowledge', 'social intellect' owing to the increasing power of the importance of machinery (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 220; quoting Marx directly). The productive forces of the intellect, of human knowledge and skills are incorporated into capital itself. At the time, Marx is thinking of the increasing importance of automatic systems for production and the networks of its communication, the world market. The concept of the general intellect prefigured networked communications technologies, human-machine subjectivities and their importance for the restructuring of capital. The critical argument, in Marx, is that the general intellect unleashes contradictions by combining scientific knowledge and social cooperation. Firstly, as less and less labour is needed capitalism undermines its very social order that is based on class exploitation. Secondly, the increasingly social nature of labour undermines private ownership and systems of wage payment. Through the concept of general intellect, capital can be seen to be setting the conditions for its collapse. The descriptions seem prophetic yet the optimism appears misplaced (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 221). He points to the work of a group of French intellectuals associated with the journal Futur AntŽrior in search of a more hopeful scenario (the group includes many of the exported key players in the autonomia group including Negri and Paolo Virno, plus Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato, et al). Building on the concept of general intellect, and assuming it to be current, they begin to analyse the conditions in which capitalism has restructured itself to cope with its contradictions. They argue that the high-tech economy is supported by 'mass intellectuality' - a subjective element of general intellect (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 222). It is in this context, that Negri and Lazzarato propose the term 'immaterial labour' to describe the nature of work in a scenario where information and communication dominate the process of production. They conclude that capital appears to have successfully contained this 'mass intellectuality' within its structures by the complex management and control of knowledge. Therefore new forms of antagonism derive from this limited access and exclusions to what should be generally available. It is easy to see evidence of this in antagonisms over intellectual property for instance. The new antagonisms can also be seen in new management techniques that appear to place value on creativity, enterprise and problem-solving - Dyer-Witheford points to Negri and Lazzarato's discussion of 'participative management' in this connection (1999: 223). All the same, these are still 'techniques of power' in restructured form that appears to grant special privileges to active and creative labour. Lazzarato even thinks the technique is more totalitarian than the production line as it involves the willing subjectivity of the worker in the participatory process (1999: 224). As with interactive art, participation, whether through teamwork in the workplace or over global communications networks is thoroughly contradictory according to Lazzarato. As a result, conflict arises between capital's objective control and the relatively autonomous subjective nature of the work. The intellectual and creative activity of hacking is a prime example of the contradiction at the heart of capital's attempt at control as it is both necessary and criminalised when it is out of control. The deployment of communications technologies confirms the pertinence of the concept of general intellect (but it remains in question just how general it actually is). However, its active contradictions are evident in the willingness of some 'participants' to wrest control from capital. Dyer-Witheford sees evidence of new alliances struggling to 'actualize "general intellect," not according to the privatizing, appropriative logic of capital, but in ways that are deeply democratic and collective, and hence truly "general"' (1999: 233). The open source movement is one obvious example of such a tendency. Emergent tendencies of collective refusal use the very communications technologies that capital has created in a dialectical fashion.